Billed as the Tour de France of running, Una Beaudry and Steve Mahood completed the ENDURrun, an eight-day, 160-kilometre running event in Waterloo on Aug. 17. Participants completed seven races, with only one day off. The first six events ranged in distance from 10 to 30 kilometres. The last one was a marathon.

Take a guess what the pair did on that one day off in the middle of the gruelling challenge? They spent the whole day resting for the final three segments, preserving their energy to make it to the finish line, right? No. They went for a run.

And what do you think happened the day after the exhausting 160-kilometre test was over? They went for a run.

Beaudry and Mahood have been running every single day for more than three-and-a-half years. And they have no intention of stopping. The streak started out as Mahood’s idea to rejuvenate the couple’s love of running. Both he and Beaudry were longtime runners but as the end of 2010 approached, their frequency was sporadic. Mahood read about a group of runners who were planning to run the first 100 days of 2011. So on New Year’s Eve 2010 – on a run, naturally – he proposed it to Beaudry.

“I thought, ‘Sure, why not?’” says Beaudry. But she never thought they’d make it to 100 days. “He’ll never last,” she told herself. “I give him two weeks.”

“I thought Una would drop first,” says Mahood.

“We’re a little competitive,” says Beaudry.

Perhaps that’s why neither of them quit. After 100 days, they decided to try to make it to a full year. After 365 days, they decided to keep going as long as they could.

The people who run every day comprise a small, dedicated, somewhat obsessive and fanatical subset of the running community. According to the United States Running Streak Association (yes, there is such a thing), the longest active American streak is more than 45 years. Jon Sutherland, a writer in California, has been running every day since before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969.

Toronto dentist Rick Rayman is thought to have the longest streak in Canada. He’s been running every day since Dec. 10, 1978, more than 35 years in total.

I love running and I respect milestones and admire streaks (two of my favourite baseball players are Joe DiMaggio and Cal Ripken Jr.), but I rarely run more than five or six days in a row. After my most recent marathon, I took almost a week off from running. In July, I ran 18 straight days; that was unusual and it felt like a lot. I’m not inclined to try even 30 days in a row, let alone 100, 1,000 or, like Sutherland, 16,000 straight.

A multi-year streak requires a level of commitment that goes well beyond the typical runner, let alone the fair-weather athlete. Rayman has run several times with the flu over the past 35 years, stumbling out of bed just long enough to get in a short, light-headed streak-sustaining run. Others I’ve talked to have had to fit the occasional run in around international, work-related travel, sometimes scheduling longer layovers so they can run at an airport in between connecting flights.

On New Year’s Eve 2012, Beaudry had a fever.

“By noon, I’m shivering and thinking ‘Oh, great, I’m sick. This is not good,’ ” she says. “But my fever broke at 8 p.m. and I thought I can do this.

“I did my run, I felt fine. I came back, felt awful, climbed back into bed. Smart? Maybe not. But it was all right. It didn’t kill me.”

The couple did the Rome Marathon in 2013. The next day, they hobbled through a downhill run from their rented apartment.

“I was passed by a man smoking a cigarette and walking down the street,” says Beaudry.

But two days later, the couple went on a 10k trail run. They say running soon after a race helps them with their recovery from a big race. And they emphasize that they keep at least one run a week short and easy, so they are still resting even though they are running.

The Ottawa couple has two advantages over other runners. Their children are grown up, so they don’t have to fit their running in around childcare. And since they are both committed to the streak, the requirement for a supportive partner is already fulfilled. You have to figure all of the decades-long running streaks belong to people who are either single or who have very patient spouses.

Instead of taking them away from each other, for Beaudry and Mahood, the streak is a big part of their relationship. They start almost every run together.

“We start together and I usually watch Steve get smaller in the distance,” says Beaudry.

“It’s a couple thing,” says Mahood. “We do it together. We have the streak together. We run together. We do everything together.”

Mahood figures that if one day one of them had to stop, the other would voluntarily end the streak as well. “I think we’d both stop together.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Beaudry says. “If I had to stop, I’d absolutely want Steve to continue. And I’ll just start over when I can.”

Despite their initial skepticism about each other, with more than 1,300 consecutive days of running behind them, neither expects the other to quit soon.

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